With just four months left at the helm of the federal Liberals, Rae says he wants to be remembered for keeping the party "in the game."

In a year-end interview, Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said the next Liberal leader must understand the job “is not an apprenticeship. It starts the day you get elected.”

By:Susan DelacourtOttawa Bureau, Published on Fri Dec 28 2012

OTTAWA — Bob Rae doesn’t want any elaborate thanks or tributes when he steps down as interim Liberal leader in April.

“Nothing exaggerated,” says Rae.

When asked how he wants Liberals to look back on his temporary, two-year tenure, Rae says he’ll be satisfied if he is regarded as the man “who kept us in the game … that’s what I was asked to do.”

Nor is Rae looking for any special job when the new leader takes over in mid-April.

“I’ll be a critic like everybody else or a spokesman for particular issue,” says Rae, who’s remaining officially neutral in the contest.

“It’s really important for the new leader to establish his or her stamp and not to be deferential to me or anybody else. I’m certainly happy to give my advice whenever I’m asked to, but I don’t intend to be a doting uncle sitting around saying ‘don’t do this’ and ‘do it my way.’”

In many respects, it’s hard to imagine this ex-premier of Ontario, widely seen as one of the most polished performers in Canadian politics, fading into the woodwork of the Commons, where he’s said he intends to remain as an MP until the 2015 election.

But no one also would have predicted a year ago that Rae would be sitting on the sidelines of the current Liberal leadership race.

In a year-end interview with the Star, Rae is in good spirits, but a recurring cold has left him hoarse and soft-spoken — not for the first time in recent months.

There’s something a bit metaphorical about the malady — even as he’s talking about impending exit from the leader’s job, Rae is literally losing his voice.

Though he doesn’t have specific wisdom to pass along to his permanent replacement, Rae warns that any future Liberal leader should grow a tough skin and also never, ever underestimate Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives.

“Resilience is everything. And an ability to pivot and an ability to move quickly to the issues that you want to deal with,” Rae says when asked about the job requirements. “This job is not an apprenticeship. It’s a real job. It starts the day you get elected and everybody has to understand that.”

In the days before Parliament was winding down for the holiday break, a question from Rae prompted Harper to show a side of himself rarely seen in the usual, partisan melee of Question Period.

“I think he’s a very shrewd politician,” Rae says. “I think he knows that most Canadians are not living on the extremes. I think he knows that an effective government always has to strike a balance.”

This explains the tight discipline in Harper’s approach to governing, Rae says.

“I think he believes he has to control an awful lot in order to avoid some of the excesses that perhaps some of his caucus colleagues would like to get him into,” he says.

“He still has some ideological enthusiasms, which he expresses from time to time. But I don’t underestimate him at all. And I think the fact that people don’t like him very much doesn’t actually trouble him. I think he understands that in order to succeed, his government has to get a certain amount of public support … but I don’t think he’s looking for adulation. I don’t think he makes that mistake.”

Rae believes there have been some important shifts in the political culture of Ottawa since the late 1970s, when he sat as an MP for the New Democrats in the Commons.

In speed and in tone, Rae says, the political arena is a much more unforgiving place — a constant battle to stay at the top of the never-ending news cycle. Rae clearly enjoys some of that pace — he’s logged a lot of kilometres on the road this year and he’s been an enthusiastic adopter of Twitter, with more than 33,000 followers and an archive of more than 2,000 “tweets.” Yet politics, writ large, is paying a price for its accelerated nature, Rae believes.

“It’s almost like we have a case of collective, attention-deficit disorder … People have a hard time remembering what you said last week,” Rae says. “There’s a total unpredictability about the business … It’s not the same game that it was 20-30 years ago.”

The next leader of the party will also quickly learn, as Rae has, that Liberals have two sets of formidable rivals in the House — the NDP and the Conservatives.

Harper and his ministers, for instance, frequently use Question Period the same way they did in opposition, using the airtime to attack their Liberal questioners.

As for the official Opposition, Rae says he’s happy the New Democrats, with their boosted numbers, have still not been able to drown out the third-place Liberals.

“Much as the NDP might like us to disappear, that isn’t going to happen,” Rae says.

But one Liberal will soon be far less visible. Rae believes that the new year will see attention moving away from Liberals in Parliament and toward the leadership candidates out on the debate circuit. So Rae, in effect, will be making a phased withdrawal from the spotlight.

“The attention will really shift much more to the leadership and to what the leadership candidates have to say,” Rae says. “And that’s as it should be.”

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